I went out of town on vacation last week, and in my travels – all of them at least one time zone removed from the greater New York metro area – I saw a fair number of diners and coffee shops and greasy spoons, and many of these establishments proudly mentioned New York City or The Big Apple in their names or on their signs. Apparently, a link to New York City certifies certain elements of American cuisine, like pizza and bagels, as the genuine article. I won’t delve too deeply into the scientific formula which states that any resemblance to a remotely palatable bagel grows progressively fainter the farther the bagel establishment in question lies from New York, except to observe that, in certain remote outposts, you can order a so-called New York bagel, or you can order a chunk of igneous rock sawed in half and fired in a kiln for twenty minutes, but regardless of which one you select, you will receive the same overcooked lump of inordinately hard reconstituted matter, and despite its marked similarity, in both density and appearance, to an asteroid gone astray, the counterperson will expect you not only to digest the alleged “bagel” somehow but also to pay $2.50 for the privilege, and rather than waste fifteen minutes of your life explaining that lox and “that pink stuff” are in fact the same thing, you settle for a bear claw and make your escape just as the Philistine behind you orders a pastrami sandwich with extra mayo. Anyhow. An association with New York City also seems to authenticate the diners throughout our great nation, an association I’ve never understood. The pizza connection I can see, and the bagel connection I can definitely see, but I don’t see the diner connection much at all. New York has a lot of diners, true, but the charm of a diner has nothing to do with geography.

A diner becomes a “great” diner, or a “real” diner, when it becomes your diner, when it becomes the place you go when you don’t want to go home quite yet. My vision of the archetypal diner comes straight out of the movie Diner, but every diner has its own personality, and it takes time to settle on the right one. My high-school friends and I shopped around carefully before choosing a default diner. My hometown’s “official” diner, the Summit Diner, resided in an aluminum subway car-type building, but it didn’t stay open late, and neither did any of the other greasy spoons in town, so for awhile we camped at the Prestige Diner in New Providence. After the renovations, though, we didn’t like it there anymore; the owners had redecorated the entire place in a shade of Pepto pink that rendered eating impossible, and they’d installed terribly bright new lighting, so for a time we sought refuge at the Millburn Diner, but we soon wearied of the Millburn, too. We could have tolerated the particles of food that mysteriously appeared in our hair during each visit, compliments of the eleven drunk idiots who had miraculously wedged themselves and their eleven cheeseburger-deluxe orders into one booth, the better to launch fragments of cole slaw and French-fry butts at our heads in one of the more misguided attempts at flirting in the annals of adolescent history. We could have tolerated the militant anti-sharing attitude of the manager, whose rigid opposition to communal snacking inspired new heights of creativity as we attempted to get a single fry from plate to gravy dish to mouth without catching his eye and prompting a bellow of “heeeeeey there – you want plate, you pay for plate! Okay! Says right on menu! Okay!” No amount of eyelash-batting or coy pleading could dissuade him from plonking another plate down and adding two dollars to the bill, but we put up with it until the night he decided that “lemon in diet Coke – you want lemon, you pay for lemon! Okay!” No, not okay, so we tried a Friendly’s a few towns over, but after an uncomfortable ex-boyfriend sighting, we had to abandon the Friendly’s also. At last, we found the Nautilus Diner. We each had to drive at least twenty minutes to get to it, and I’ve seen auto-salvage lots more organized than the parking lot, but the minute we walked in, we knew we’d found the place.

First of all, the Nautilus – known as “the Nauseous” to loyal patrons – stayed open all damn night. Most New York diners stay open all night, but they won’t let you park it there and smoke yourself stupid until the sound of birds chirping sends you home. At the Nautilus, we sat around in a booth and filled up ashtray after ashtray and drank so much coffee that, technically, none of us should have slept a wink since the spring of 1989. We made mandalas out of salt on the tabletop. We ordered one piece of pie and split it six ways and ashed into the crust. We played the same songs over and over on the little jukebox in our booth and handed Kleenex to heartbroken friends and gave our phone numbers to the Drew University students two booths over. Nobody minded. We could have gotten our mail at the Nautilus and nobody would have minded. And we got all the lemon we wanted, for free. The Nautilus had the right look, too, the right atmosphere – lushly patterned linoleum that didn’t show a thing, deep red leather in the booths, giant menus with an entire page devoted to side orders, low-hanging fake Tiffany lamps, yellow glassware. Good-natured shouting issued from the kitchen. The owner’s daughter sat at the register, staring glumly at the rotating pies and jumping up every time the phone rang. And after awhile, the staff began to remember us. We would get the same booth we always did, and the coffee would show up immediately afterwards. For a brief period, before beer and boys splintered the group and took us out into the world, we all felt like Norm.

Good diners make you feel at home. How can you tell you’ve entered a good diner, before you lift a single spoonful of tapioca? Everything should appear reasonably clean, but not too clean. Now look closer. Patrons eating at the counter? Good sign. Waitresses in uniform? Also a good sign. Large groups of men wearing sweatshirts with nothing underneath and big gold signet rigns? Excellent sign. Recent renovations? Iffy. Bitchy sign posted over the mints, forbidding you to eat more than one? Get back in your car – nobody needs to deal with mint rationing. Look for amusements like table jukeboxes and place-mats with dumb word games on them. Correctly spelled specials boards should make you suspicious.

A diner can reek of atmosphere, but if the Nautilus hadn’t mastered certain food basics, we couldn’t have made it home base. A diner must serve a generous plate of fries; gravy should come to the table in a separate dish and plenty hot. The waitress should make the coffee strong and keep it coming. Rice pudding should have a firm consistency, but not too chewy; it shouldn’t look yellowed, it shouldn’t have a crust, and by no means should it come with raisins or whipped cream unless you asked for it. Food-based reasons to rule out a diner include limp garnish; skimpy tomatoes; cheesesteaks that don’t come with fries; desserts with a fishy taste; failure to provide olives with bagel platters; obviously watered ketchup (all diners do it, good ones know how to hide it); and pears in the fruit cup. For some reason, pears in the fruit cup augur ill for the diner experience. I don’t know why, but it never fails. Still not sure your local diner makes the grade? A pickle is worth a thousand words. Repeat after me: chips bad, spears good.

I wouldn’t recommend spending as much time at diners as we did; frankly, I can’t believe we didn’t all look like Walter Hudson by the time we finally graduated. But consider getting to know your neighborhood diner. Better still, go for a drive, or catch a train, and get to know a diner outside your nabe. Skip your usual Saturday-morning trip to Starbucks and throw down with a grape leaf instead. You can’t beat the people-watching, or the price, and the next time you’ve had a crappy day and you can’t sleep and you have no comfort food in the house, you’ll have somewhere to go.

“You’ve always got the guys at the diner if you wanna talk.”

Find a diner near you.

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